The normalization of audio files of multiple, esoteric and proprietary formats to a single, unified, lossless format of equal resolution; in this case, BWF.

Detailed description

Audio files intended for long-term preservation may be created outside of the control of standardized archival workflows, presenting archives with files of non-standard formats.

To archive such files, lossless normalization to a single, standardized file type of equal resolution to the original is ideal.

Issue champion

Adam Tovell

Possible approaches

Free software tools for the mass transcoding of digital audio files are numerous, but reliant on the support (and installation) of specific codecs, batch-processing functionality, or APIs to allow some degree of automation. The transcoding of multiple file types for normalization prior to archival often requires the manual use of multiple tools or parts of tools to achieve the desired output. Unifying this process with a single, command line-driven tool, compatible with multiple file types would solve issues of efficiency when dealing with large digital collections.

Ideally, this would be solved by a single software tool to convert both lossy and lossless formats to lossless (BWF) files, preserving the technical characteristics of the original file without incurring any objective loss in quality. Sampling rates, channel configurations should be maintained, with output files encoded with a bit resolution sufficient to represent the bit rate of their source.